Cocaine Inc: Pablo Escobar

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born December 1, 1949, in the town of Rionegro, nestled in the northern Andes not far from the city of Medellin in the Colombian province of Antioquia. The son of a peasant farmer and a schoolteacher, there was nothing in Escobar’s background to suggest the meteoric and spectacularly sociopathic trajectory his life would follow. While fairly well-educated, he never had a reputation as a brilliant intellect. Rather, like Al Capone, his main “talent” was an unlimited capacity for violence.

When poverty forced Escobar to drop out of Antioquia’s provincial university in 1966, he started stealing cars and trafficking marijuana, which made him a millionaire at 22. Next he invested his fortune in the nascent cocaine business, monopolizing local coca production by paying peasant farmers twice the going rate and investing in coca cultivation in the remote mountain valleys of Peru and Bolivia, far from weak central governments.

Coca, bribes, and murder propelled Escobar to the top ranks of the Medellin crime scene. Here he met Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez, who’d already set up a small-scale smuggling and distribution operation in south Florida before returning to Colombia to build up his family’s cocaine processing operation in 1977. Now their partnership allowed Escobar to expand into processing and distribution as well.

Coming to America

At this point the Colombians were still locked out of the U.S. cocaine trade by Cuban smugglers who employed “mules” (usually airline passengers or flight attendants) to bring relatively small amounts of the drug into south Florida, where it was sold to mid-level dealers working with the American Mafia.

The Cuban smuggling monopoly was finally cracked by a third Colombian, Carlos Lehder Rivas, working with George Jung, an American drug trafficker. While cellmates in Federal prison in the mid-1970s, Jung and Lehder laid plans to fly cocaine into the U.S. aboard single-prop Cessnas, allowing them to do away with unreliable “mules” and ship much larger amounts of cocaine. In 1977 their first run of 250 kilograms sold for about $15 million, attracting the interest of their suppliers, who were looking to ship more cocaine to the U.S. — a lot more.

Now the last piece fell into place: with Lehder on board, Escobar had the supply, processing, and smuggling capacity to support mass marketing in the U.S. On a typical run Lehder and Jung flew from the Bahamas to Escobar’s ranch in Colombia on Friday, returned to the Bahamas Saturday with 300-500 kilograms of cocaine, then blended into the Sunday rush of planes carrying weekend vacationers back to the U.S.

The profits were astronomical at every step. In 1978 each kilo probably cost Escobar $2,000 but sold to Lehder and Jung for $22,000, clearing Escobar $20,000 per kilo. In the next stage they transported an average of 400 kilos to south Florida (incurring some additional expenses in hush money for local airport authorities) where mid-level dealers paid a wholesale price of $60,000 per kilo; thus in 1978 each 400-kilo load earned Escobar $8 million and Lehder, Ochoa, and Jung $5 million each in profits. Of course the mid-level dealers did just fine: after cutting the drug with baking soda each shipment retailed on the street for $210 million, almost ten times what they paid for it.

Soon Lehder was hiring American pilots to fly a steady stream of cocaine into the U.S., paying them $400,000 per trip. At one trip per week, in 1978 this translated into wholesale revenues of $1.3 billion and profits of $1 billion.

The Two Escobars

Jeff Zimbalist and Michael Zimbalist

While rival drug cartels warred in the streets and the country’s murder rate climbed to highest in the world, the Colombian national soccer team set out to blaze a new image for their country. What followed was a mysteriously rapid rise to glory, as the team catapulted out of decades of obscurity to become one of the best teams in the world. Central to this success were two men named Escobar: Andrés, the captain and poster child of the National Team, and Pablo, the infamous drug baron who pioneered the phenomenon known in the underworld as “Narco-soccer.” But just when Colombia was expected to win the 1994 World Cup and transform its international image, the shocking murder of Andres Escobar dashed the hopes of a nation.

Through the glory and the tragedy, The Two Escobars daringly investigates the secret marriage of crime and sport, and uncovers the surprising connections between the murders of Andres and Pablo.

Personal Statement
Our films tend to focus on disenfranchised communities in the process of rising up and transforming their political and economic circumstances. We choose these stories due to the scale of their historic importance—this is where societies are shaped.
By comparison, sports have often felt like mere diversion, games limited to the playing field. At times, we have both drifted from the passion for sports we shared as young athletes and fans, engaging ourselves in other endeavors as seasons of professional competition passed by.

Then, invariably, definitive moments in sports history would grab our attention and turn our logic upside down. Like in 1994, when an athlete named Andres Escobar was murdered for accidentally scoring an own goal that cost the Colombian National Team a chance at winning the World Cup and transforming its negative image on the international stage. Here was a country with a national identity so integrally connected to the success of its soccer team that one mistake on a playing field dashed the pride of an entire nation and cost a man his life.

Looking into the incident, we learned that the dramatic rise and fall of Colombian soccer was inextricably tied to the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Drug Cartel, considered by many the ‘ruling party’ of Colombia at the time. Sport in Colombia was not only mirroring the personality and politics of society, but also an inseparable part of that society – the playing field an extension of the streets and offices where influential decisions are made.

On our journey through diverse walks of Colombian society during production, it became clear that this was far from a classic “deal-with-the-devil” narrative. Rather, this was the story of the passions and dreams of a people intrinsically tied to the rise and fall of a team. Stories such as this revive our childhood fascination with sports and confirm the fundamental role they play in shaping our world.

Jeff Zimbalist and Michael Zimbalist Bio
Jeff and Michael are Emmy Award nominated writers, directors, and editors whose films have been broadcast on HBO, MTV, PBS, Channel 4 UK, the BBC, and BET, as well as theatrically distributed throughout North America, Europe, South America, Australia and Asia.
FAVELA RISING, which Jeff directed, shot, edited and produced, was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary in 2005, and among the 36 international awards it has won are Film of the Year by the International Documentary Association, Best Film at the Sydney International Film Festival and Leeds International Film Festival, as well as Best Director at the Tribeca Film Festival.

FAVELA RISING was theatrically exhibited in five continents, held over in theaters in the United Kingdom for six months, and theatrically released by ThinkFilm and HBO in 34 cities in North America.
Jeff and Michael are currently developing a 3D IMAX film on Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro with Quincy Jones, a feature documentary on the working poor being produced by Stan Lathaan and Russell Simmons, a feature documentary starring Shakira for her ALAS movement, and THE SCRIBE OF URABÁ, a narrative feature Jeff and Michael wrote and will direct about the true story of the first Colombian Peace Community, starring Academy Award nominee Viola Davis (Doubt) and Goya Award winner Ivana Baquero (Pan’s Labyrinth).

Jeff and Michael’s production company, All Rise Films, is a Ford Foundation grantee and has produced award-winning documentaries on third world development issues for clients such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the John Templeton Foundation. Recently, All Rise finished a four part series for the Sundance Channel. The brothers’ segment on The Addiction Project, HBO’s 14-part series on drug abuse, continues to broadcast on HBO.

Jeff graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with honors in Art Semiotics and Modern Culture and Media, and a concentration in Latin American Studies. Michael graduated with honors from Wesleyan University and trained as an actor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

DECEPTION: The Murder of Colonel James E. Sabow, USMC will be published by Amazon this October. This article is an excerpt from the book.

(PHILADELPHIA, PA) – Gary Webb, an excellent investigative reporter, was found dead in his apartment on December 10, 2004. Webb’s death from two gun shots wounds to the head was ruled a suicide by Sacramento County coroner Robert Lyons.

In 1998, Seven Stories Press published Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and The Crack Cocaine Explosion. The book was based on Webb’s “Dark Alliance” investigative reporting of the crack epidemic for the San Jose Mercury News. Webb reported the sale of tons of cocaine to LA street gangs with the profits used to support the Nicaraguan Contras. Military aircraft were used to ferry drugs from South and Central America into the U.S. El Salvador’s Ilopango Air Force Base was a major base of operations for flights carrying weapons and supplies from the US and cocaine into the US.

[I]Webb wrote about the use of military aircraft to ferry drugs from South and Central America into the U.S., “The only air force base near Fort Worth at the time of the alleged drug flights from Ilopango was the now closed Carswell Air Force Base, the home of a Strategic Air Command squadron.” Webb reported that Allen Paul Rudd, a Colombian drug trafficker turned undercover government informant, described to federal officials a supply chain that ferried guns to the Colombian cartel, “off-loaded the guns, put cocaine abroad the planes and the cocaine was taken to United States military bases.”

Webb went on to report about a 1988 memo from U.S. Attorney Walter E. Furr of testimony from Allen Raul Rudd who said that the Medellin cartel’s Pablo Escobar told him “[he] had made a deal with Vice President George Bush to supply American weapons to the Contras in exchange for free passage for their cocaine deliveries into the U.S.”

Could Webb’s reporting put him a hit list? Was he writing a follow-up book to Dark Alliance? Be prepared to be labeled a ‘conspiracy nut’ if you tell others that Gary Webb was murdered and forced to write a suicide note before another pulled the trigger.

COLOMBIA’S most notorious drug lord is back on high, 22 years after he was shot dead by special forces as he fled over a rooftop.

With highly anticipated Netflix show Narcos hitting the screens, and social media littered with snaps of tourists soaking up the legend in his home country, Pablo Escobar is lighting up once more.

His story — replete with shadowy plots, assassinations and wild extravagance — has captured the public imagination before, and the “King of Cocaine” has been the subject of numerous movies, books and TV series breathlessly retracing his steps.

So why does Escobar keep coming back, and what’s the impact for the people from a nation fighting to move forward from a bloodstained past?